Todd Porter: Walsh impacted game like no one else

Tuesday

Jul 31, 2007 at 12:01 AMJul 31, 2007 at 1:25 PM

Walsh impacted many football lives. He impacted the game, which is why he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Todd Porter

Legendary coach Bill Walsh did not invent football. But he did invest in it. Not so much monetarily, but cerebrally. Walsh took a complex game and made it simple. He did what few do. He furthered something that had come such a long way by the time he could make a difference.

That’s not easily done.

Bill Walsh was to football what Kasparov was to chess.

Thirty years ago, Jim Tressel found himself in a meeting room at Ohio State. He was an assistant coach at the University of Akron. It was Tressel’s start in the coaching business. Woody Hayes invited Tressel to attend a coaching clinic, and Tressel did what good students do.

He sat in the front row, because Bill Walsh was talking offense. He was talking passing game, and he was talking quarterbacks. That afternoon in Columbus might as well have been a four-year coaching degree.

Tressel took meticulous notes. But they weren’t good enough.

So the young coach asked for the word-for-word transcript of what Walsh said.

“And I’ve been using it the last 30 years constantly,” Tressel said Monday from Columbus before leaving for the Big Ten media days in Chicago. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I refer back to what he said from a teaching standpoint.”

Tressel teaches the game the same way Walsh did. Not through fear, through knowledge. Walsh wasn’t just great because of the way he advanced football. He was great because of his approach to the game. Football is a thinking man’s game.

Walsh died Monday at age 75 after a battle with leukemia. The news scrawl outside the Chicago Tribune can go unnoticed most days. But on a hot and humid day in downtown Chicago, passersby stopped to see the words. They turned to buddies to repeat what they just read. “Bill Walsh dies at 75 ...”

Walsh impacted many football lives. He impacted the game, which is why he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It is why grown men will gather and tell Bill Walsh stories that last into the wee hours. Their NFL glory days are long gone, but Walsh helped them get to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The branches on Walsh’s coaching tree will fill a wing of the Hall of Fame one day. Technically, Mike Shanahan isn’t one of those branches. The Denver Broncos head coach never coached under Walsh, though he was the offensive coordinator in San Francisco under Walsh’s successor, George Seifert.

Nevertheless, he feels part of his legacy.

“There’s no question that he’s a great innovator,” Shanahan said. “He studied it. He worked at it.

He tweaked with a lot of different things. When you hear the West Coast offense, you’re going back to Bill Walsh, and he’s the one who started it.”

When Paul Brown retired as head coach of the Bengals, the Hall of Fame coach passed over Walsh for the job. Walsh was Brown’s quarterback coach in Cincinnati, but Brown fell victim to the popular thought about Walsh back then. No one thought he could motivate his players by fear.

He couldn’t. Walsh didn’t believe in that. Walsh believed a in motivating by empowering players with knowledge. Think about that.
Who are the best players in the game today? They’re the smartest ones.

Earlier this month, USA Today named Joe Montana and Jerry Rice as the two greatest NFL players of all time.

Without Walsh, Montana might not be in Canton.

“Bill Walsh was a great teacher,” said Tressel, who used to visit with Walsh when Youngstown native Eddie DeBartolo owned the 49ers and Tressel coached at Youngstown State.

The last time Tressel got to spend a significant amount of time with Walsh was 2000.

Youngstown State traveled to California to play Cal-Poly, and the Penguins flew to San Francisco and practiced at the Niners facility. Tressel asked Walsh to speak to his team.

“There wasn’t an eye in there not trained on him,” Tressel said.
Including Tressel’s.